PELLY BAY
pleasure. Ten minutes earlier I had been torn between rage
and pity over this inept and exasperating creature, and I found
myself now filled with admiration for his artistry. You believe,
perhaps, that it is easy to build an igloo because it is done very
quickly and seems to be rough and unfinished: I assure you that
there are a thousand tricks in this trade, that it wants a parti-
cular skill to make use of a friable snow, to set a wall securely in
place, to reduce the dimensions of an igloo in mid-work because
of a sudden the blizzard forces you to hurry your job. And all
this, Shongili was able to do, seemingly without the least diffi-
culty. He knew his snow, knew all its whims, all its subtleties.
To me, for whom snow had hitherto been nothing at all, he
was suddenly revealing its quality, its true price. He respected
it: snow was to this brute a thing divine.
Yet the fact was there: the man was a brute. He would
wake rne in the black darkness of our morning, stirring, snort-
ing under his coverings like a seal, spitting and hawking until I
had opened an eye and he had my attention- I knew what was
up. He had woken: therefore I must wake: and once awake, I
must light the Primus stove and make tea for him. Algunerk's
little game had been to see that we got off as late as possible:
with this one it was a matter of having his tea as early as he
could get it. He would slip down from the iglerk, bend over so
low that, in true Eskimo fashion, he stood with his bottom
higher than his head, and he would scrape, scratch, dig round
in his effort to waken me. *M\eP he would moan, 'Aiie!* and
again *Aiie!'
'Una?' I would shout angrily. 'What is it?5
*Kam-mak-to? — 'Daybreak,5 he would say.
'Not yet, confound you!'
And all this to have a mug of tea—for he had brought no
grub of his own, as I learnt only after we were well out.
There would be ten minutes of silence, then he would re-
sume. Andrla filled with loathing, would sit up in my sleeping-
bag and make the tea — three great mugs for each of us, ami a
couple of biscuits. He would squat, eyeing my movements, the
217